A big number of jobs on the station has some sort sense of reward for doing their intended role. Scientists get technology and other benefits from R&D, researching toxins or xenobio. Virologists can make benefitial viruses, Clowns and Mimes can point and laugh at people after pranking them. Cargo workers get points for collecting crates and can buy all sorts of stuff. Miners get new technologies after collecting ores from the point machine, and so on.

Janitor isn't one of these.

Preceding from its reputation as a punishment role, Janitor is possibly the worst role to play as on the server right now. Hallways get covered with blood, oil, trash and corpses every five minutes faster than you can clean them and will constantly be refreshed even on spots you already cleaned from footprints people running over pools of blood and oil that are rampant through the station, people dripping and drooling blood when being dragged to Medbay, that damn MULEbot that keeps running people over, etcetera.

You can and will be attacked, disarmed, pushed, have your gear stolen and even be killed for slipping people unintentionally, even if you have a dozen wet floor signs around the wet floor. People want to hunt you for your galoshes or for meme reasons. Janitor borgs will point and laugh at you for having to go through so much work to do what they do flawlessly and without effort. At worst, you will be arrested for Derilection of Duty if you can't clean hallways fast enough, which has happened to me more times than I'd like to admit.

Your big weapons to help you with your cleaning are: Space Cleaner grenades that are limited in quantity and that most chemists will not go through the trouble of making more for you. Space Cleaner sprayers and the backpack tank that depend on cleaner that is on limited supply, runs out rather quickly for the amount of cleaning you have to go through and that is extremely dependant on the chemist filling them up for you after you use them (if there is one and if they're not busy making space drugs, space lube and meth). Your janicart that in most occassions is pushed around, stolen and/or destroyed with all your tools inside and without a replacement for it aside from a lousy mop bucket. The Pimpin' Ride, which is slower than you moving with galoshes, is a target for people to steal and that has no practical use until...

Advanced Sanitation Technology. It helps, but it is only a technology that gets researched 30 minutes into the round and is also dependant on your Pimpin' Ride not having been stolen, spaced or destroyed as well as miners having brought enough ores to build them.

To help remedy this problem I would increase the capacity of the space cleaner bottles as they were before instead of being a cuck-size of 100 units, make drying agent actually relevant and dry tiles instead of just being an add-on for galoshes, reduce the amount of footprints that a pool of blood/oil generate (oil specifically, they get refreshed when you step on their footprints), maybe make a precedent to or move Advanced Sanitation to a lower techweb tier to encourage Scientists to research it earlier than 30 minutes into the shift, and so on.

I strongly suspected the borgs were one humaned by the Captain because of their increasingly strange behavior throughout the round after the Captain had entered their upload and seemingly changed the laws. I had asked twice if I could blow the borgs to no response (because there was no admin online apparently). They were constantly complimenting the Captain and calling her pretty and essentially threatening people who called the Captain ugly - Pepper Oni.

Janitor is not fun because rounds don't last and yet station gets covered fully in blood and shit within 10 minutes. Also Janiborg renders you obsolete. It forces you to get Janicart scrub upgrade asap, but you are still worse, and it kinda removes the point of your job.

In the words of the fruit, the game evolved, there's no reason for Janitor to exist anymore.

Change Janitor to something like Maintenance Tech and give them all the janitor stuff along with gear to basically fill miscellaneous engineering tasks like renovations or rage cages. Give them decent night vision too, as a perk.

Not every job exists to be action-packed and fast-paced. Some people like to go janitor when they want a more relaxed play, which can occasionaly turn exciting when there are runes to clean, a blood demon to contain or a bloodborn virus spreading around.

It's the rounds that are action packed and fast paced which kinda undermines Janitor gameplay. Plus, only few engage in a casual roleplaying (small talk) anymore. Have you played Bartender recently? At least Janitor has some mechanics to work with.

Nerfing footprints made things a bit less hopeless but it doesn't fix the fact playing janitor is boring and uninteresting, hard work doesn't pay off and anyone can easily ruin your shift. As a result it's mostly picked for its griefing potential since everyone else who wants to play seriously isn't getting any entertainment out of it.

There's also essentially two ways to play it, each with its own problems:1. Use the mop and be a nuisance to the crew. It's slow, ineffective at keeping up with the amount of dirt generated during a moderately busy round and will likely get you in trouble. There's some entertainment to be had in that and it's kind of a staple of SS13, but it's not for everyone and it gets old quickly for everyone else.2. Use space cleaner and be entirely reliant on chemistry to cooperate for refills. I don't have to point out why this doesn't always work out.

It could use a point system similar to mining that rewards you with better equipment and supplies by cleaning messes. The stun rework and consequent slipping nerf might allow for buffing the mop since wet floors aren't going to be as much of an issue

janitor is great robustness practice>find a mess>set up a perimeter of wet floor signs>begin mopping>point at signs silently whenever someone inevitably slips>if someone attacks you or steals your stuff you have a free pass to beat the absolute shit out of themif im ever feeling rusty i can just roll janitor and practice different combat techniques on some random greyshirt that tries to step to me.

if they ever do try to pull something i always give them a single warning of "stop" or "give it back" first. if you dont, have fun orbiting me and whining in ghost chat, not even "muh escalation" can help you then.

I really don't know what to say, others have expressed the point better than me, janitor is well, the janitor, It can't be the janitor and be fun if you want fast paced pvp action or something? Like, pick security or another job?

An overhaul of janitor and bartender might not be bad. I have no idea how though. The chef is the other role with no end game but there's still a lot of interaction and conflict when playing the chef. People always come get food, small talk, people getting you stuff to make weird food with, brining you bodies, breaking in and getting choked, etc.

If the fruit is right and there is no purpose in having a janitor anymore we should keep the janitor closet and make it all access. If someone wants to clean something they can.

i dunno i mean it made dwarves actually start cleaning, and they'd use a dedicated butchery room

Dwarves were different from moodlets.

With dwarves, you (hopefully) used a dedicated butchery area and whenever you had to clean, you would start wondering why you exist just to suffer. All in all, it was really annoying when it got to worst case scenario however, at the time, you could play a dwarf so that outweighs the negative of actually having to clean.

With moodlets, it was a fucking mixed bag of what people went through apparently. Some people, like me, rarely noticed much issue. Some people powergamed it to kingdom fuck by getting hugged in a shower while reading a book with a cigarette in your mouth. Other people just got completely fucked by this system apparently.

Either way, there's a difference between dwarves and moodlets. Unless they're fighting Bubblegum and are losing despite having a lot of dwarves, they can't possibly reach the mess level that the station could. If you wanted to avoid miasma in the fort then you could just start digging away. On the station, you better fucking hope someone didn't drag their bloody footprints 3x in every corner of the map or that you can just enter space without dying. It's even worse due to the fact that the GAME has to tell you what is dirty or not. For all you know, you could be a bartender in the most clean bar ever however some fuckass just gibbed himself in the hallway nearby and now you have a 100% super shitty mood.

also moodlets doesn't let you play as a dwarf so yeah that's already a big downside to the idea of making environment affect mood.

Janitor has some good utility in being a great new player role. You spawn in your little cubby room that basically no one ever breaks into, and you have all the time in the world to learn your inventory (and hands) system. Once you're good to go, you have a basic task to work towards that also isn't mission critical.

Once you learn what you need and move past it, it might not be that fun, but the role doesn't have to be staffed every round anyway.

I enjoy playing janitor on occasion, but it'd be nice to be the end-all expert of cleaning and maint by the end of a long shift with upgrades etc, instead if a janiborg just being you but impossibly better in every way.Upgrade janitor to the almighty position of CUSTODIAN!

Floiven wrote:I enjoy playing janitor on occasion, but it'd be nice to be the end-all expert of cleaning and maint by the end of a long shift with upgrades etc, instead if a janiborg just being you but impossibly better in every way.Upgrade janitor to the almighty position of CUSTODIAN!

Janitors should receive tools and materials to replace windows, honestly. It's not like the engineers are going to repair all the hulk damage to medbay.

Funfact, you can use a flamethrower filled with water vapor to clean really fast but good luck with getting everything you need to make that work without getting your canister stolen an opened in the middle of a hallway cause that's the only actual practical use for it

Mickyan wrote:Funfact, you can use a flamethrower filled with water vapor to clean really fast but good luck with getting everything you need to make that work without getting your canister stolen an opened in the middle of a hallway cause that's the only actual practical use for it

You can also use the flamethrower to slip people, bonus points if it's supercooled